Reading Wednesday
Jul. 14th, 2021 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker. I loved this one, obviously. She's just doing so many things I like (including, as I said last week, things that make the book riskier and less marketable) and I am here for it.
My one criticism is the last act largely relies on multiple characters being in telepathic communication, something which in the previous book was described quite realistically as a hellish experience for Chava. It made for a cluttered, confusing sequence that undermined the otherwise careful worldbuilding and the constraints of what's basically historical fiction. But beyond that, it was gorgeous, expansive, and engrossing.
Toronto At Dreamer's Rock / Education Is Our Right by Drew Hayden Taylor. Two one-act plays from the late 90s—one is a meeting between three teenage boys—one from the present, one from before colonization, and one from the future; the other, a piece about the Tory policy to cap post-secondary education funding for Indigenous students. They're accessible and didactic, like almost all political theatre, and very much a product of their time, but I enjoyed them and I think the kids would too.
Currently reading: Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry This Place, edited by Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod and John Lorinc. This is an excellent series of essays on the Indigenous history and present in Toronto, including pre-colonization settlement, the grotesque scam of the Toronto Purchase, and current accounts of Indigenous communities and cultures. I'm only a few essays in but it's great so far. I mean, it's horrifying, because even given the history of land theft and genocide in Canada, Toronto was a particularly bad one, but it's very well-written and informative.
My one criticism is the last act largely relies on multiple characters being in telepathic communication, something which in the previous book was described quite realistically as a hellish experience for Chava. It made for a cluttered, confusing sequence that undermined the otherwise careful worldbuilding and the constraints of what's basically historical fiction. But beyond that, it was gorgeous, expansive, and engrossing.
Toronto At Dreamer's Rock / Education Is Our Right by Drew Hayden Taylor. Two one-act plays from the late 90s—one is a meeting between three teenage boys—one from the present, one from before colonization, and one from the future; the other, a piece about the Tory policy to cap post-secondary education funding for Indigenous students. They're accessible and didactic, like almost all political theatre, and very much a product of their time, but I enjoyed them and I think the kids would too.
Currently reading: Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry This Place, edited by Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod and John Lorinc. This is an excellent series of essays on the Indigenous history and present in Toronto, including pre-colonization settlement, the grotesque scam of the Toronto Purchase, and current accounts of Indigenous communities and cultures. I'm only a few essays in but it's great so far. I mean, it's horrifying, because even given the history of land theft and genocide in Canada, Toronto was a particularly bad one, but it's very well-written and informative.
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Date: 2021-07-14 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-14 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-15 03:03 am (UTC)A feather in sari-land
(ugh, that title...)
I didn't really know DHT but I knew his companion: Alok Mukherjee, who, between being the head of the OHRC and the head of the TPS Board, did a PhD at York U and taught the one Indian Culture course I took, where he set to thoroughly destroy anyone's illusions about Indian culture being a Good Thing, instead exposing its patriarchal and casteist characteristics, in particular. Anyway, the essay is fun.
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Date: 2021-07-15 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 04:03 pm (UTC)